Hiding & Disabling ribbon items in Project Server, Part I

By blurg64

Recently I have been working on a number of projects where the requirement to disable ribbon commands in Project Server has come up again and again. There are a couple of posts out there around modifying the ribbon, but they tend to focus on adding new items, not removing or disabling them, so I thought I would post something covering it. Of course, before you look at disabling the ribbon item through a customisation, you should look to see if the item can be disabled using the Project Server security model first.

What you need to know about the ribbon

If you are going to do any work on the ribbon, you need to be aware of a couple of things, firstly for performance reasons the ribbon is cached client side, which makes it really really painful to work with as your changes may not be visible straight away. To get around this, I found using the InPrivate mode of Internet Explorer stopped the client side caching and ensured my ribbon changes were visible.

Secondly, if you are going to hide or disable a ribbon item you need to know the ID of the item. Both SharePoint and Project Server have xml configuration files that define the structure of the ribbons, for SharePoint the ribbon structure is defined in a number of files, but the main one is CMDUI.XML located in {SharePointRoot}TEMPLATE\GLOBAL\XML\CMDUI.XML. For Project Server, the ribbon definitions are kept in the PWACONFIG.XML file located in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\PWARibbon\listtemplates. The file itself contains the configuration of each button within the PWA app, including the name, image, command to be fired when clicked and references to the tooltips etc.

Example of PWACONFIG.XML

Finally, in the case of Project Server, you need to make sure you find the correct Id, things like the Timesheet ribbon have different id’s depending on whether the timesheet is running in Single Entry Mode, or normal timesheet mode.

To disable or hide? That is the question…

There are two schools of thought when disabling commands in SharePoint and therefore Project Server, to disable or hide the buttons. Hiding the buttons will remove the button completely from the ribbon, whereas disabling the button will leave the button on the ribbon, but in a state that cannot be clicked, thus stopping the functionality the item provides.

  <td valign="top" width="496">
    <a href="http://epmpire.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/image1.png"><strong><img style="background-image:none;padding-left:0;padding-right:0;display:inline;padding-top:0;border-width:0;" title="Normal Ribbon" border="0" alt="Normal Ribbon" src="http://epmpire.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/image_thumb1.png" width="438" height="104" /></strong></a>
  </td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td width="62">
    <strong>Disabled</strong>
  </td>
  
  <td valign="top" width="496">
    <a href="http://epmpire.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/image2.png"><strong><img style="background-image:none;padding-left:0;padding-right:0;display:inline;padding-top:0;border-width:0;" title="Disabled button on ribbon" border="0" alt="Disabled button on ribbon" src="http://epmpire.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/image_thumb2.png" width="438" height="103" /></strong></a>
  </td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td width="62">
    <strong>Hidden</strong>
  </td>
  
  <td valign="top" width="497">
    <a href="http://epmpire.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/image3.png"><img style="background-image:none;padding-left:0;padding-right:0;display:inline;padding-top:0;border-width:0;" title="Hidden button on ribbon" border="0" alt="Hidden button on ribbon" src="http://epmpire.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/image_thumb3.png" width="490" height="104" /></a>
  </td>
</tr>
Normal

 

As you can see from above, the disabling route will be less confusing and will lead to a more consistent user experience for end users, but there are still situations where hiding might be the best route to go (I have a couple of customers that preferred hiding to disabling).

In the next post, we will look at how hide and disable a button using Visual Studio and some SharePoint features.